All of the ‘classic’ anthropological fieldworkers collected the artefacts of the cultures they did research on. For a long time ‘material culture’ was a big issue in anthropology, but became less and less important through time. It indeed became some sort of ‘deprecated’ subdiscipline. Only during the last years ‘material culture’ was reborn in the wake of globalization and research on commodities and consumption. Game-modding communities actually produce a lot of artefacts, therefore they possess what anthropologists call ‘material culture’, although the artefacts are almost exclusively immaterial by nature (text, program-code, applications, 3D and 2D computer-graphics [still and animated, interactive … Continue reading →